Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “I shall draft one for you,” Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt said. “But first—Beck!” He raised his voice. The adjutant came bounding into the room. “Fetch the senior lieutenant here something from the mess,” Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt told him. “She has come a long way on a sleeveless errand, and she could no doubt do with something hot.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Generalleutnant!” Beck said. He turned to Ludmila. “If you would be so kind as to wait one moment, please, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova.” He dipped his head, almost as if he were a maitre d’ in some fancy, decadent capitalist restaurant, then hurried away. If his commander accepted Ludmila, he accepted her, too.

  When Captain Beck came back, he carried on a tray a large, steaming bowl. “Maizes zupe ar putukrejumu, a Latvian dish,” he said. “It’s corn soup with whipped cream.”

  “Thank you,” Ludmila said, and dug in. The soup was hot and thick and filling, and didn’t taste that alien. Russian-style cooking used a lot of cream, too, though sour as often as sweet.

  While Ludmila ate, Beck went out to his own office, then came back a couple of minutes later to lay a sheet of paper on General Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt’s desk. The German commander at Riga studied the message and glanced over at Ludmila, but kept silent until, with a sigh, she set down the bowl. Then he said, “I have a favor to ask of you. If you don’t mind.”

  “That depends on what sort of favor it is,” she answered cautiously.

  Graf Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt’s smile made him look like a skeleton that had just heard a good joke. “I assure you, Senior Lieutenant, I have no improper designs upon your undoubtedly fair body. This is a purely military matter, one where you can help us.”

  “I didn’t think you had designs on me, sir,” Ludmila said.

  “No?” The German general smiled again. “How disappointing.” While Ludmila was trying to figure out how to take that, Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt went on, “We are in contact with a number of partisan bands in Poland.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. “I suppose I should note, this is partisan warfare against the Lizards, not against the Reich. The bands have in them Germans, Poles, Jews—even a few Russians, I have heard. This particular one, down near Hrubieszów, has informed us they could particularly use some antipanzer mines. You could fly those mines to them faster than we could get them there any other way. What say you?”

  “I don’t know,” Ludmila answered. “I am not under your command. Have you no aircraft of your own?”

  “Aircraft, yes, a few, but none like that Flying Sewing Machine in which you arrived,” Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt said. Ludmila had heard that German nickname for the U-2 before; it never failed to fill her with wry pride. The general went on, “My last Fieseler Storch liaison plane could have done the job, but it was hit a couple of weeks ago. You know what the Lizards do to larger, more conspicuous machines. Hrubieszów is about five hundred kilometers south and a little west of here. Can you do the job? I might add that the panzers you help disable will probably benefit Soviet forces as much as those of the Wehrmacht.”

  Since the Germans had driven organized Soviet forces—as opposed to partisans—deep into Russia, Ludmila had her doubts about that. Still, the situation had grown extremely fluid since the Lizards arrived, and a senior lieutenant in the Red Air Force did not know all there was to know about deployments, either. Ludmila said, “Will you be able to get word to Lieutenant General Chill without my flying back to give it to him?”

  “I think we can manage that,” Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt answered. “If it’s all that stands in the way of your flying this mission, I’m sure we can manage it.”

  Ludmila considered. “You’ll have to give me petrol to get there,” she said at last. “As a matter of fact, the partisans will have to give me petrol to let me get back. Have they got any?”

  “They should be able to lay their hands on some,” the German general said. “After all, it hasn’t been used much in Poland since the Lizards came. And, of course, when you return here, we will give you fuel for your return flight to Pskov.”

  She hadn’t even asked about that yet. In spite of that forbidding name and those titles, Generalleutnant Graf Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt was indeed a gentleman of the old school. That helped Ludmila make up her mind to nod in agreement to him. Later, she would decide she should have picked better reasons for making up her mind.

  Richard Peterson was a decent technician but, as far as Brigadier General Leslie Groves was concerned, a hopeless stick-in-the-mud. He sat in the hard chair in Groves’ office in the Science Building of the University of Denver and said, “This containment scheme you have in mind, sir, it’s going to be hard to maintain it and increase plutonium production at the same time.”

  Groves slammed a big, meaty fist down on the desk. He was a big, meaty man, with short-cropped, gingery hair, a thin mustache, and the blunt features of a mastiff. He had a mastiff’s implacable aggressiveness, too. “So what are you telling me, Peterson?” he rumbled ominously. “Are you saying we’re going to start leaking radioactives into the river so the Lizards can figure out where they are? You’d better not be saying that, because you know what’ll happen if you are.”

  “Of course I know.” Peterson’s voice went high and shrill. “The Lizards will blow us to kingdom come.”

  “That’s just exactly right,” Groves said. “I’m damn lucky I wasn’t in Washington, D.C., when they dropped their bomb there.” He snorted. “All they got rid of in Washington was some Congresscritters—odds are, they helped the war effort. But if they land one on Denver, we can’t make any more nuclear bombs of our own. And if we can’t do that, we lose the war.”

  “I know that, too,” Peterson answered. “But the reprocessing plant can only do so much. If you get more plutonium out of it, you put more byproducts into the filters—and if they make it through the filters, they go into the South Platte.”

  “We have to have more plutonium,” Groves said flatly. “If that means putting in more filters or doing more scrubbing of the ones we have, then take care of it. That’s what you’re for. You tell me you can’t do it, I’ll find somebody who can, I promise you that. You’ve got top priority for getting materials, not just from Denver but from all over the country. Use it or find another job.”

  Behind his horn-rimmed glasses, Peterson looked like a puppy who’d got a kick in the ribs for no reason at all. “It’s not the materials, General. We’re desperately short of trained personnel. We—”

  Groves glowered at him. “I told you, I don’t want excuses. I want results. If you don’t have enough trained men, train more. Or else use untrained men and break all your procedures down into baby steps any idiot can understand: if this happens when you do that, then go on and do this next thing. If something else happens, do that instead and try the procedure again. And if that or that happens, yell for your boss, who really knows what’s going on. Takes a while to draft procedures like that, so you’d better get cracking on it.”

  “But—” Peterson began. Groves ignored him—ostentatiously ignored him, picking up the topmost sheet from his overflowing IN basket. The technician angrily got up and stomped out of the office. Groves had all he could do not to laugh. He’d seen furious stomps much better done. He made a mental note to keep an extra close watch on the plutonium reprocessing plant over the next few weeks. Either Peterson would get production up without releasing radioactive contamination into the river, or somebody else would get a crack at the job.

  The sheet Groves had picked up was important in its own right, though, important even by the standards of the moment, where everything in any way connected with atomic weapons had top priority. He rubbed his chin. This one was routed through the Office of Strategic Services, which was something he didn’t see every day.

  “So the damn Russians want our help, do they?” he muttered. He didn’t think much of the Russians, either their politics or their engineering ability. Still, they’d made the first human-built atomic bomb, even though they had
used fissionables they’d stolen from the Lizards. That showed they had more on the ball than he’d given them credit for.

  Now, though, they were having trouble turning out their own radioactives, and they wanted somebody to get over there some kind of way and give them a hand. If it hadn’t been for the Lizards, Groves would have reacted to that with all the enthusiasm of a man who’d had a rattlesnake stuck in his skivvies. But with the Lizards in the picture, you worried about them first and only later about the prospect of Uncle Joe with an atomic bomb, or rather a whole bunch of atomic bombs.

  Groves leaned back in his swivel chair. It squeaked. He wished for a cigarette. While you’re at it, why not wish for the moon? Instead of worrying about the moon, he said, “I wish Larssen were still with us. He’d be the perfect guy to ship off to Moscow.”

  Larssen, though, was dead. He’d never been the same after his wife took up with that Army fellow—Yeager, that was his name. Then, even after Larssen made it to Hanford, Washington, and back, nobody’d wanted to disrupt work at the Metallurgical Laboratory by relocating. That had been a hell of a trip; too bad it was wasted. When it came to coping with the travails of the open road, Larssen was top-notch.

  What he couldn’t handle were his own inner demons. Finally, they must have got the better of him, because he’d shot a couple of men and headed east, toward Lizard-held territory. If he’d sung a song for the aliens, as Groves had feared he might, nuclear fire would have blossomed above Denver. But the cavalry had hunted him down before he could go over to the enemy.

  “Well, who does that leave?” Groves asked the office walls. Trouble was, the memorandum he’d got didn’t tell him enough. He didn’t know where the Reds were having trouble. Did they even have an atomic pile going? Was separating plutonium from an active pile their problem? Or were they trying to separate U-235 from U-238? The memo didn’t say. Trying to figure out what to do was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle when you didn’t have all the pieces and weren’t sure which ones were missing.

  Since they were Russians, he had to figure their problems were pretty basic. His own problem was pretty basic, too: could he spare anybody and ship him halfway around the world in the middle of war, with no guarantee he’d get there in one piece? And if he could, who did he hate enough to want to send him to Moscow, or wherever the Russians had their program?

  He sighed. “Yeah, Larssen would have been perfect,” he said. Nothing he could do about that, though. Nothing anybody could do about it, not till Judgment Day. Groves was not the sort to spend time—to waste time, as he would have thought of it—on something he couldn’t do anything about. He realized he couldn’t decide this one off the top of his head. He’d have to talk things over with the physicists.

  He looked at the letter from the OSS again. If somebody went over to lend the Russians a hand, the U.S.A. would get paid back with gadgets taken from a Lizard base that had mutinied and surrendered to the Soviet Army.

  “Have to make sure the Reds don’t cheat and give us stuff that doesn’t work or that we’ve already got,” he told the walls. The one thing you could rely on about the Russians was that you couldn’t rely on them.

  Then he stopped and read the letter again. He’d missed something there by letting his worries about the Russians blind him to the other things that were going on.

  “A Lizard base up and mutinied?” he said. He hadn’t heard of anything like that happening anywhere else. The Lizards made for solid, disciplined troops, no matter how much they looked like chameleons with delusions of grandeur. He wondered what had driven them far enough over the edge to go against their own officers.

  “Damn, I wish Yeager and those Lizard POWs were still here,” he muttered. “I’d pump ’em dry if they were.” Inciting Lizards to mutiny had nothing to do with his current assignment, but, when curiosity started itching at him, he felt as if he had to scratch or die.

  Then, reluctantly, he decided it was just as well Yeager hadn’t been around when Jens Larssen got back from Hanford. Larssen probably would have gone after him and Barbara both with that rifle he carried. That whole mess hadn’t been anybody’s fault, but Larssen hadn’t been able to let go of it, either. One way or another, Groves was sure it had flipped him over the edge.

  “Well, no point in worrying about it now,” he said. Larssen was dead, Yeager and his wife were gone to Hot Springs, Arkansas, along with the Lizard POWs. Groves suspected Yeager was still doing useful things with the Lizards; he’d had a real flair for thinking along with them. Groves didn’t know exactly what that said about Yeager’s own mental processes—nothing good, odds were—but it was handy.

  He dismissed Yeager from his thoughts as he had Larssen. If the Russians were willing to pay to get the knowledge they needed to build atomic bombs, they needed it badly. On the other hand, Lenin had said something about the capitalists’ selling the Soviet Union the rope the Reds would use to hang them. If they got nuclear secrets, would they think about using them against the United States one fine day?

  “Of course they will—they’re Russians,” Groves said. For that matter, had the shoe been on the other foot, the U.S.A. wouldn’t have hesitated to use knowledge in its own best interests, no matter where that knowledge came from. That was how you played the game.

  The other question was, did such worries really matter? It was short-term benefits versus long-term risks. If the Russians had to bail out of the war because they got beat without nuclear weapons, then worrying about what would happen down the line was foolish. You’d fret about what a Russia armed with atomic bombs could do to the United States after Russia had done everything it could do to the Lizards.

  From all he’d learned—Yeager and the Lizard prisoners came back to mind—the Lizards excelled at long-term planning. They looked down their snouts at people because people, measured by the way they looked at things, had no foresight. From a merely human perspective, though, the Lizards were so busy looking at the whole forest that they sometimes didn’t notice the tree next door was in the process of toppling over and landing on their heads.

  “Sooner or later, we’ll find out whether they’re right or we are, or maybe that everybody’s wrong,” he said.

  That wasn’t the sort of question with which he was good at dealing. Tell him you needed this built within that length of time for the other amount of money and he’d either make it for you or tell you it couldn’t be done—and why. Those were the kinds of questions engineers were supposed to handle. You want philosophy, he thought, you should have gone to a philosopher.

  And yet, in the course of his engineering work for this project, he’d listened to a lot of what the physicists had to say. Learning how the bomb did what it did helped him figure out how to make it. But when Fermi and Szilard and the rest of them got to chewing the fat, the line between engineering and philosophy sometimes got very blurry. He’d always thought he had a good head for math, but quantum mechanics made that poor head spin.

  Well, he didn’t have to worry about it, not in any real sense of the word. What he did have to worry about was picking some luckless physicist and shipping him off to Russia. Of all the things he’d ever done in his nation’s service, he couldn’t think of one that roused less enthusiasm in him.

  And, compared to the poor bastard who’d actually have to go, he was in great shape.

  III

  Panagiotis Mavrogordato pointed to the coastline off the Naxos’ port rail. “There it is,” he said in Greek-accented German. “The Holy Land. We dock in Haifa in a couple of hours.”

  Moishe Russie nodded. “Meaning no offense,” he added in German of his own, with a guttural Yiddish flavor to it, “but I won’t be sorry to get off your fine freighter here.”

  Mavrogordato laughed and tugged his flat-crowned black wool sailor’s cap down lower on his forehead. Moishe wore a similar cap, a gift from one of the sailors aboard the Naxos. He’d thought the Mediterranean would be warm and sunny all the time, even in winter. It was sunn
y, but the breeze that blew around him—blew through him—was anything but warm.

  “There’s no safe place in a war,” Mavrogordato said. “If we got through this, I expect we can get through damn near anything, Theou thelontos.” He took out a string of amber worry beads and worked on them to make sure God would be willing.

  “I can’t argue with you about that,” Russie said. The rusty old ship had been sailing into Rome when what had been miscalled the eternal city—and was the Lizards’ chief center in Italy—exploded in atomic fire. The Germans were still bragging about that over the shortwave, even though the Lizards had vaporized Hamburg shortly afterwards in retaliation.

  “Make sure you and your family are ready to disembark the minute we tie up at the docks,” Mavrogordato warned. “The lot of you are the only cargo we’re delivering here this trip, and as soon as the Englishmen pay us off for getting you here in one piece, we’re heading back to Tarsus as fast as the Naxos will take us.” He stamped on the planking of the deck. The Naxos had seen better decades. “Not that that’s what you’d call fast.”

  “We didn’t bring enough to have to worry about having it out of order,” Moishe answered. “As long as I make sure Reuven isn’t down in the engine room, we’ll be ready as soon as you like.”

  “That’s a good boy you have there,” the Greek captain answered. Mavrogordato’s definition of a good boy seemed to be one who got into every bit of mischief imaginable. Moishe’s standards were rather more sedate. But, considering everything Reuven had been through—everything the whole family had been through—he couldn’t complain nearly so much as he would have back in Warsaw.